BJØRN CHRISTIANSEN | Photographer

Nine models, two make-up artists, three intensive days in the facilities of Yellow Cock Studio has produced a lot of pictures. I have learned a lot, the models are guaranteed to have done weird things. This is a little collection of photos that were taken during the model testing for Modelbureauet Modelbooking. Sunday is my last day of testing here in Denmark before I go back to Norway to celebrate Christmas Holiday.

A double exposure beauty portrait of Kristin Folstad from Trend Models. The portraits in this series of Kristin was taken during the photo marathon we had at school for a competition in creating a poster for Trondheim Jazzfest. Maybe I should have gone with this photo instead of the one I delivered for the contest.

Making this photo

The technical aspect of making this photo is quite easy. Set up the lighting you want. For this type of image you’ll need a flash, either a studio strobe or a speedlight. Place your model and instruct her what to do when the flash fires. Find the focus point. Set the aperture to whatever you have metered the the light setup. Shutter speed is crucial for this type of images, instead of freezing the image with a shutter of 1/125 or 1/250 or what ever you normally use in studio photography, turn the shutter speed to about two or three seconds to give the model time to do what you have instructed her or him to do. Keep the ambient light low or if you can control it, switch all existing light off to have a pitch black studio. Press down the shutter button, trigger the flash manually as many times as you want. The more exposures you have, the lighter and abstract the images get. I tend to stick with two or three exposures.

Here are some more double exposures I’ve done of Karina Kruksve

This is the second picture in my series I shot with Kristin Folstad yesterday. The shot was taken for a poster-competition and the photo marathon that is ongoing these three weeks in January. This is a more cute, melancholic and sweet portrait of Kristin, no hard facial expression as the first one were. Makeup and hair is done by Hong-My Thi Nguyen supervised by me.

Lighting technique

This portrait is a high-key photo which is a technique where most part of the information in the picture is on the right side of the histogram, instead of a mid-key photo which has all information spread evenly throughout the histogram, the opposite of high-key is low-key, which has all its information in the left side of the histogram. A high-key photo is fairly light and the shadow areas, which in most photos define the shape. This particular series is shot with four light sources, two Elinchrom BX Ri 600 with strip-light softbox from each side and behind the model as a kicker-light defining the models edge and one beauty dish about 45 degrees above the model and almost straight on. Since the boom wasn’t available I had to use a regular tripod. To avoid having the tripod in the models face, the beauty dish is positioned slightly to the left of the model. Also I have modified the beauty dish with a grid to give more contrast to the image. The last light is also a flash head with a softbox behind and right of the model shooting at a slight angel at the background give it a nice, even light.
The last thing in this rig is three polystyrene boards painted black, two on each side and one as a ceiling or roof above the model. This gives the image more contrast instead of having all the white walls in the studio casting reflection and killing the nice shadow the beauty dish makes.

Next assignment

We had evaluation of the Jazzfest-posters we shot today, but we couldn’t publish since it was sort of a contest. Next assignment is shooting a commercial picture of glasses. I booked two models I haven’t shot before, so I will gain a bit new experience this time as well. I am going for a classical beauty-shot with strict styling, not very different from the series I did with Kristin yesterday. I went to Brilleland in Kongensgate and got to borrow four pairs of glasses, some from the new collection from Moods of Norway. Hoping styling, models, makeup and glasses will fit well together. Studio time is from 5 p.m. until 8 p.m. Wish me good luck!

Today I had a photo shoot with Kristin Folstad (Trend Models) at school for this Trondheim Jazzfest-assignment. Since I still don’t have a very good idea what I am going to do with this assignment, I shot just a beauty portrait of Kristin figuring I could try to do something more graphical in post production with her. Makeup artist at the shoot were the first grader Hong-My Thi Nguyen.
Tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. I am going to have the evaluation of my picture, so I should be doing post production on the photos I took today instead of blogging.

På lørdag fikk jeg endelig tid til å fremkalle filmer, både sort/hvitt og fargefilm. Her er et portrett tatt med Hasselblad av Ida Karin Fenstad. Jeg fotograferte to versjoner av dette bildet, en med Nikon D700, Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 og en med Hasselblad 500c og 80mm f/2.8.
Ble litt skuffet over at fargene ble litt slappere. Kanskje jeg skal kjøre bildet til etterbehandling for å få litt mer smell i det. Hasselblad og mellomformat er i hvert fall veldig gøy å jobbe med.

Her er forsåvidt innlegget med den digitale versjonen: Beautyportrett – Ida Karin Fenstad

I dag har jeg hatt et beauty-opptak med Ida Karin Fenstad. Opptaket er ikke i forbindelse med noe som helst, bare for å feire at jeg endelig er ferdig med Arkitekturkurset på skolen og for at jeg har lyst til å prøve meg i en sjanger jeg ikke er så vel bevandret i.

Jeg har fotografert Ida Karin i forbindelse med modellscouting i påska 2010 og fant ut at hun kunne passe fantastisk godt til et beauty-bilde hovedsaklig fordi øynene hennes bare trollbinder.

Sminken er gjort av Miriam Zohra Labreche som jeg har brukt under tidligere opptak. Den er inspirert av i første omgang noe Erik Fagerheim fra Fotofashion.no har gjort tidligere i høst, men med et snillere og ikke så dramatisert uttrykk. I øyeblikket vet jeg ikke helt hva teknikken heter, men det er i hvert fall sminke-støv-greier som er malt og blåst på for å få en litt kornete tekstur jeg liker veldig godt. Jeg kunne kanskje fått Miriam til å dratt på med enda litt mer pulver, men siden dette var første opptaket jeg har gjort av denne typen, så visste jeg ikke helt hvordan resultatet kom til å bli.

Her er et av portrettene jeg tok av Ida Karin tatt i påska 2010:

 

Ta gjerne en titt på bloggen til Miriam Zohra Labreche for mer inspirasjon til sminke og diverse :)